Toshiba 1.6TB SSD review

When 1TB isn’t enough

Our Verdict

If you want a fast, large capacity SSD for your data center, NAS device or other professional use, then this is worth considering – though it comes with a steep price.

For

Fast

Dependable

Great build quality

2.5-inch form factor

Against

Expensive

Not for everyone

Solid state drives (SSDs) with high capacities are become ever more prevalent these days, and Toshiba has continued this trend with its THNSN1Q60CSE 1600GB hard drive – which for the sake of brevity and sanity, we’ll refer to as the Toshiba 1.6TB SSD.

Large capacity SSDs such as the Toshiba 1.6TB SSD have meant that in recent years we’ve not had to sacrifice capacity for the speeds SSDs provide – we can now have the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, SSD prices are still much higher than traditional hard drives, and the Toshiba 1.6TB SSD costs £883 at its cheapest (around $1100, AU$1400), though we’ve seen it selling for over £1000 in some places ($1200, AU$1600).

For comparison, a traditional Western Digital Red 2TB drive can be had for around £70 ($90, AU$110). Of course the performance of the Toshiba 1.6TB SSD is going to be far faster than that of a traditional hard drive with comparable storage space, which accounts for some of the difference in price.

At such a high price, the Toshiba 1.6TB SSD is firmly in the realm of enterprise customers, rather than regular users looking to upgrade their laptop. Because its aimed at enterprise and professional users, it comes with a number of features designed for those use cases, which further justify the high price.

Specifications and features

The Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD is SATA 3 6Gbs compatible, capable of speeds of up to 500MB/s read, 480MB/s write. These are speeds provided by Toshiba – its real-world speeds may be different – as we’ll find out in a bit. Still, these projected speeds show why you’d want to consider the Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD despite its price – this is a very fast SSD, able to achieve higher transfer rates than those of a traditional hard drive.

It has a power consumption of 4.5W when reading and writing. This means it could actually save money in the long run when used in always-on situations, as its energy consumption is quite low. The low power draw also means that it will emit less heat, so your NAS/PC/data centre or wherever you install it won’t need to kick its fans into overdrive when in use.

The Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD has a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2 million hours – so you can be pretty confident that any data you store on this drive will be safe – making this a viable option for NAS devices used to back up important files.

Despite the high capacity of the drive, it’s housed in a standard 2.5-inch drive case, which means it can easily be installed in most devices – including laptops – which is a nice feature that gives you flexibility when installing the drive.

Performance

In our CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests, which sees how fast data and be written and read, the Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD actually surpassed Toshiba’s stated speeds- a welcome surprise!

It scored 541MB/s read speeds and 523.1MB/s write. There’s usually a discrepancy between read and write speeds (with read speeds being faster), however in this case the gap is pretty small, which makes the Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD a more consistent performer than its competitors.

So how does this stack up to its competitors? The Crucial MX300 SSD 1050GB is another large capacity SDD, though with a much lower price tag (£229, $249, around AU$390), and scores read speeds of 534.1MB/s and write speeds of 517.4MB/s - so not quite as fast as the Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD. It will be your call if that speed (and capacity) difference is worth the extra cash.

The Integral SVR Pro 100 SRI 8TB SSD is another enterprise-grade hard drive with a huge capacity – this time 8TB, and scored 549MB/s sequential read, and 513.4MB/s write in our tests, around the same speeds as the Toshiba 1.6TB THNSN1Q60CSE SSD – though it’s almost three times the price of the (already quite expensive) Toshiba.